Dr. M.R. (Mark) Alfano

Profile

My work in moral psychology encompasses subfields in both philosophy (ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind) and social science (social psychology, personality psychology). I am ecumenical about methods, having used modal logic, questionnaires, tests of implicit cognition, incentivizing techniques borrowed from behavioral economics, neuroimaging, textual interpretation (especially of Nietzsche), digital humanities techniques (text-mining, archive analysis, visualization), and of course good old-fashioned intuition-mongering. I have experience working with R and Tableau Public.

Research

I have published two monographs, two journal editions, two edited volumes, over twenty journal articles, and over twenty chapters in edited volumes. I am currently working on a grant-funded project to map the topology of social media networks in order to understand the ways in which they support or undermine reasonable public discourse about controversial topics.

Additional information

M.R.
(Mark)
Alfano

profile

Biography

Mark Alfano is associate professor of philosophy at Delft University of Technology. He received a doctorate from the Philosophy Program of the City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY GC) in 2011, and he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and the Princeton University Center for Human Values, as well as assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon.

Mark works on moral psychology, broadly construed to include ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. He also maintains an interest in Nietzsche, focusing on Nietzsche’s psychological views. His papers have appeared in numerous journals, including Philosophical Quarterly, The Monist, Erkenntnis, Synthese, and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

His first book, Character as Moral Fiction, argues that the challenge to virtue ethics spearheaded by John Doris and Gilbert Harman should be co-opted, not resisted. In 2015, he published Current Controversies in Virtue Theory, which contains new work by Ernest Sosa, Robert Roberts, Heather Battaly, and others. His second monograph, Moral Psychology: An Introduction, was published by Polity Press in 2016. He is currently writing a research monograph on Nietzsche and editing two volumes on virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. In more recent work, he has developed a multi-modal measure of intellectual humility. He is now exploring the generosity and integrity in collaboration with a neuroscientist, data-mining obituaries to extract patterns of value judgments, and directing a series of edited volumes on The Moral Psychology of the Emotions, which will include books on contempt, anger, disgust, pride, compassion, and forgiveness.